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I was briefly in Europe for FOSDEM and to see some of my French coworkers. We flew into Charles de Gaulle and drove up to Brussels, where FOSDEM is, and then drove back for a few days in Paris. I’m flying back now.

I’ve been working now for Mozilla for 9 or 10 months. It’s an interesting place, and it has some similarities to being a Volunteer. The first, of course, is that it’s a company with a public mission and a global scope. There’s also the fact that some 40% of its employees are "remote", meaning not working in an office but rather embedded in some community, and working for its good in a way that feels subversive. In Cameroon, my post was in Batié, but now it’s in New York. When it doesn’t feel like being a Volunteer, it feels like joining a secret society, one with a proud history and rich traditions. Looking at me, you’d think I’m just some guy working on a laptop, but actually I’m part of a global network of operatives, communicating over the Internet on a frequency that nobody hears, even though anyone can listen to it.

Being in Europe brings out a lot of the same interesting linguistic situations that I was familiar with from my time as a Volunteer. The choice of language felt itself like a logistical concern. Most Cameroonians are Francophone, of course, but the Anglophones feel like an oppressed minority, and so speaking French to one could be seen as an insult. Sometimes people would want to speak English with me because they wanted to practice English, or to show off, and I didn’t mind either. When with Americans, we’d normally speak English, but we might drop into French if it was the only language that all participants could understand. Over time I tended to keep my mouth shut until someone addressed me, and then follow them in whatever language they were using. I began to sense a power in that first moment, when the first word comes out. Until you spoke, you might be Dutch, British, French, American. Afterwards, all possibilities were removed but one. I often tried to delay that revelation as long as possible using expedients like non-verbal noises, or the use of brand names (which were the same in both languages).

Belgium at a tech conference is even more complicated, linguistically, than being in Cameroon. Belgium’s official languages are Dutch (and/or Flemish), French, and German in some parts. Brussels, being the capital, is a linguistic no-man’s-land. But English is the language of tech, and thus of FOSDEM. Still, I found myself switching into a Volunteer "natives speak French, friends speak English" mindset when I ordered at the cafeteria, even though it was staffed by FOSDEM. At the restaurant in Paris where we ate last night, one server overheard our mixed group talking English (the only language everyone supported) and would address us in English, while the other one hadn’t noticed and continued to address us in French. In case it wasn’t obvious, the title of this blog post is alternance codique, which means "code switching".

FOSDEM itself was a pretty good conference. It’s interesting in a lot of ways — it’s free, and registration isn’t required; you just show up. It’s held on a college campus and staffed entirely by volunteers (with a little v). One thing that makes FOSDEM unusual for a tech conference is that they set up "bars" on campus which sell a variety of Belgian beers. Of course I tried almost all of them during the weekend. If I had to select a favorite, I think it might be the cherry lambic that I had, the Kriek.

Brussels is relatively affordable for Europe. Belgian beers in most places were only a few Euro. Like everywhere else in Europe, tax is included in all listed prices, and there’s no such thing as a tip. Buses have displays showing the next few stops, and there’s also a tram system, and I think a subway as well. Everything is cute and everyone we met was polite.

By contrast, Paris was not what I was expecting from Europe at all. If Brussels is a pleasant but stiff bureaucrat who maintains a formal distance, Paris is an old lady who lives in a corner house and chain-smokes aggressively. She can be mean, but she’s had a rich and colorful life and if she invites you to dinner, it’s always fascinating. The City of Lights is full of gilding and filigrees and beautiful historical buildings. The place we were staying dates from 1725 or so, but locks on the front door were much more modern and quite substantial, apparently because Paris had a serious burglary problem for a while. While we were waiting for one of our group to pick up a few things in the supermarket, someone shoplifted and the guard chased him down the street. Nothing violent happened per se, but it definitely felt less safe than Brussels.

Apart from a couple bad apples, the Parisians have been lovely. I had a charming if somewhat challenging conversation in French with the check-in counter for Air France about why I didn’t have long hair any more like in my passport. (I had been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to understand the accents of the people in Europe, but I was gratified to find that I have largely been able to get by.) The food has been quite good when I’ve been able to get it without milk. Paris is nice, but in the (admittedly short) time I spent there, I didn’t really see how people can fall in love with the place, unless you’re already powerfully in love with the idea of France or the French.

Some photos:

The place where we stayed in Brussels had some cool nerd junk.

Brussels.

Beer list. For a conference, this is quite a selection!

The PostgreSQL elephant was in attendance. Can MySQL do this??

Vending machine waffle. There were fresh ones being made too, but these were only 0.50€ and didn’t have milk.

One of the passages/galleries in Paris. These are actually pretty cool; they’re not exactly closed to the outdoors, and they have a skylight, so you can feel like you’re getting some fresh air, but at the same time it’s enclosed enough to be pleasant, even during the winter.

Notre Dame de Lorette, a fancy church in Paris. Also depicted are my teammate Rémy and our intern Mansimar.

My intern Gabi and the adorable Firefox stuffed animal at the Paris office.

Here I am now in Yaoundé, at the case for what is probably the last time. I’ve spent the entire week juggling administrivia and Boris, who helped me down from post, and although I haven’t learned any Czech, written the last one or two installments of the fiction, found former Volunteer of my village Dinah Peck (or possibly Diana Peck?), nor seen all the Yaoundé-based people I wanted to see, I’ve still gotten to see some of my favorite Volunteers, weighed myself (around 190 lbs., making my weight gain about 15 lbs.), drank sufficiently, and performed a certain number of medical tests. I’m sure you will all be pleased to know that my stool sample was negative, my weight gain is not the result of a thyroid problem, my blood tests were fine, I’m still HIV negative, and my TB test was positive. It’s been, in short, a pretty fun and relaxing week, and I keep waking up after sleeping too much after going to bed too late with the sensation that I just had a terribly meaningful dream that helped me center and come to terms with my Peace Corps Experience.

Tomorrow I cease to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, and start being Another White Guy in Cameroon. (Although I guess you never really stop being a Volunteer.) The next three days will require a bit of finesse as I bounce from place to place. The current plan is: Friday night at maybe Claude’s, Saturday night in Bafia, Sunday night maybe with Yaya or whoever manages to get a hotel room here in Yaoundé, and then Monday it’s time to go.

One of the traditions here in Peace Corps Cameroon is that COS-ing volunteers sign this wall in the living room. Putting your name, village, years of service, and program are all pretty standard. Lately a lot of people have been adding quotes or jokes. J-Veld and Lindsey D. have this tag-team thing going on, but "Why did the fungi leave the party?/ Because there wasn’t mush-room" is lame in just the right way that I’m OK with it.

Of course, the whole thing is somewhat silly because every few years the wall fills up and they have to repaint it. And anyhow Peace Corps Cameroon is trying to move its office and thus the case. In the end, the whole thing is utterly and absolutely provisoire, and perhaps reflects a deeper, maybe somewhat depressing truth about service, along the lines that you get to fill a role for two years here, but I just don’t believe that an impact has been made. But maybe that’s just a limited form of cynicism that will go away bien tôt — certain Cameroonians have said that their previous interactions with former Peace Corps Volunteers have made them what they are, even if they were not the best students, and that perhaps the impacts of your presence or absence are yet to really be felt.

Allison decided to eschew any pretense of wisdom, and drew a hippo as a reference to a humorous and somewhat dangerous experience she had kayaking down a river and ending up face-to-face with a hippo (one of the more dangerous animals on this continent). She, thinking like me, decided to write it on a bookcase, figuring that it is slightly less likely to be painted over and might even end up being transported to a new case, providing her a better shot at Peace Corps immortality.

As for me, I spent a good long time trying to figure out how to take these biting and depressing insights about the ceaseless parade of warm bodies and shape it into a twelve-to-twenty word sound bite. As with many things, I decided that the most profound way I could express myself was with a quote, namely: "There are no sweeter words than this: Nothing lasts forever.." Out of deference to the cheerful optimism of my fellows, and perhaps a sense of perverseness, I decided to write it "hidden" under a blackboard that’s hanging on another bookcase. I feel like perhaps I could have done better with the whole thing, but all in all I’m a little pleased with the result.

Here are the names of some of the gone-but-not-forgotten, including Henry, Austin, Timothy, and Lindsay C.

Some cute pictures of Volunteers relishing their rare time together.

Our gonging-out, which is a ceremony where Admin says "Thanks" and "Good-bye" to those volunteers who have proudly served their countries. Honored Directress Lahoma is already gone — early COS, ha ha — and the new one, Jackie something or other, seems pretty sharp and quite on top of things.

I’m, of course, sitting next to Queen Cristina, and we’re both wearing our Bamiléké outfits. (Mine was a present from the Batié Mayor’s Office. I don’t know where hers came from.) Here I was responding to Francis’s saying that I was a "notable"; I was clarifying that they just gave me the clothes, specifically that I had found a notable in a dark alley in Bafoussam and decided that I could make better use of the outfit.

Volunteers who are all COSing together, meaning doing the same medical stuff and ceasing to be Volunteers on the same day, get to gong out together. Here are the rest of the people from our COS group.

The new Honored Directress.

COSing means you get the coveted Peace Corps Cameroon pin, which depicts the American and Cameroonian flags and the Peace Corps logo. (You can just barely see it near my shoulder.)

I was supported by Claude and Boris, depicted here with Jake.

Family photo! The Peace Corps sign is taken off the main admin building, and we think the orientation is quite stylish.

[Edit: the original title of this post was Sportif, which was also used on 2011 November 24, so I changed it to Habits, which means "clothes", or, in Anglophone, "dresses". Neither title really has anything to do with the text of this entry, just the pictures at the end..]

Today I’m in the Baffice (pet name given to the Organization "office" in Bafoussam, where running water and good-quality Internet abound), for official reasons that are completely legitimate. However, being here reminds me of Kevin’s birthday party a week ago, and specifically the aftermath, where salad was being made sloppily in the kitchen while everyone else was asleep. I’m not sure we cleaned the lettuce properly. The next morning, that salad was like an edible scavenger hunt, with the lettuce being accompanied by spoons and even a piece of chocolate. It’s the kind of silliness that feels good looking back, not "got trashed and puked red" like at other parties.

It’s raining here in Bafoussam, not hard but thoroughly, and there’s a fog and everything is muddy. Rain is generally a good trigger in this country to put me in a good mood, and if that weren’t enough I’m having some of a box of white wine that I found at the Boulangerie du Peuple. Quite a turnaround from last night, when I was so ticked off I didn’t know what I was liable to do.

See, there’s Boris who I’ve written about, who is by and large a decent dude, and there’s also my neighbor’s kid Boris, who composed the Bac this year (after failing it last year). He’s kind of a tool. He took the skill I taught him, of formatting computers, and he immediately started charging people to do it. I tried not to get too upset about it — after all, he’s probably still saving people money that they’d have to spend to go to Bafoussam to find a technician — but it immediately soured my relationship with him. Afterwards, I lent him something that didn’t come back — apparently sometimes he just finds stuff around the house, can’t identify the owner (a family of 9!), and sells it — putting him solidly on my "avoid" list. He had borrowed 2000 CFA (about $4), never paid it back, and suddenly disappeared to Yaoundé without paying me back. (Brondone apparently reminded him about the money, and he responded with something rude about how he was going to leave me with the debt or something like that.) He lies a lot and even his girlfriend(s?) know and yet still kick around with him. He’s taken money from his younger brothers — and probably people outside his family too — to develop photos, which he hasn’t.

And even barring his rotten personality, he’s an idiot technically too. Every computer failure is a virus and the remedy is always a reformat. He’s mastered that thing about indigenous knowledge where you know it absolutely, so it must be true. Even people who ought to know better, like Fokui, have been brought up short by his confidence. I hate, hate, hate people like this. It’s completely fine to not know something, but if you act like you know something when you’re talking out your ass, especially if you’re an egotistical Big Man on the High School Campus, then you’re a twat. Shit’s fucked up.

Before I continue this story, let me make it clear that I don’t like to lie. Trust is hard enough in this country, or any country, and I have found that once broken, even in a small way, it’s impossible to get it back. I think other Volunteers are more comfortable with it, especially making up things about how the Organization doesn’t allow this-or-that thing, but I just don’t do it, as a general rule.

Anyhow Brondone came over last night saying that his mom (Marie-Chantal, or Marie-Cha, or Ma-Cha) had talked to Boris on the phone and he’d asked the mother to ask me to burn him a couple CDs of Linux. Normally I’d be pleased to help turn someone onto the open source thing and so forth, but I think this person would be a net loss. I told Brondone to tell his mom that I wasn’t doing fuck-all for his son until he paid back my 2000 CFA. I was hoping that she would be shocked that her son owed me money — unlike the other kids, Boris is certainly age of majority and has means of getting money if he needs — and would put the screws into him, possibly repaying my money. But really most important to me was that he be punished. (After all, the money’s small potatoes, even here.) Brondone wasn’t completely thrilled about being the bearer of this particular message, because his mother may have implied that he shouldn’t mention that Boris was the originator of this particular request. But Brondone’s been the victim of Boris’s shit too, so he went and told as I asked.

Brondone came back a little later, saying, "When I said that, she got angry!" Not at Boris, mind you, nor at me, but at Brondone: "She had wanted me to lie! For the money, she prefers that he keep it!" Well, that’s a shame. "Aren’t you going to go talk to her?" No. If I’m lucky, I will never talk to her again. "She’s probably going to come by and try to invent some story about what’s going on. But you didn’t hear it from me!"

I hate when people try to put one over on me. In French I say I hate when people try to jongler me, which literally means juggle. And Marie-Cha is my neighbor. Has she not already profitéd enough from me? Is it really necessary that she not only protect her thieving son but that she try to lie to me about it? I spent a good two or three hours angry, trying to debate the merits of trying to sell her CDs which contained only a text file saying "Fuck. You." and sundry other invective. Plan B was to look her in the eye and say "I don’t have any CDs" while taking the CDs that I do have and breaking them in half. But then I took an hour or two to organize files on my machine, and calmed down enough to have an idea. I love ideas.

Remember that Marie-Cha’s family is well-off enough to have a computer, but the lady is a Biology teacher. So when she shows up the next morning and says "I want you to burn me two CDs of the Linux system," someone told her about it. She doesn’t even try to offer a story about miscommunication or Brondone’s misunderstanding of a situation or anything.

"I’m so sorry," I say. "I deleted them. I already freed the space. I don’t have them any more."

"Way." (Weird Cameroonian interjection.) "Well, now what am I going to do?"

"If you give me a little money," I said, "I could go to the cybercafe and download them again."

"How much money?"

"Three thousand." Volunteers aren’t supposed to "turn a profit", as it were; we’re being paid already. But one good turn deserves another.

"Fine. But in that case I want three CDs."

I’m leaning now towards actually burning the CDs and not leaving her hanging. But I haven’t made up my mind.

Anyhow, while I was cleaning up the files on my hard drive, I found these pictures that Boris apparently took at the lycée. Let’s consider those repayment of my debt too.

This is Clovis and Stevine. Stevine was one of the students I liked better, although that did change once she cheated blatantly on her finals. She’s smaller than the other kids, which as a general rule means she’s smarter, because she’s younger so didn’t have to retake exams too much.

They’re all at the épreuves sportives, which is like their final exam for gym class. Or maybe it’s inter-lycee sports. They tend to dress up on these sorts of days, but I don’t know exactly who they’re trying to impress. This shot is a hell of a lot better than whoever was filming it deserves.

Youdom V. V., one of my favorite students, doing the shot-put (no idea what that’s called in French).

They wear socks when they’re being sportif, apparently.

Cameroonian girls especially tend to do this kind of glamor shot.

Probably most of these students are in my Terminale class, but I only recognize Stevine (red shirt). Check out the patterns on their leggings!

That’s Poula on the right with his hands in the air. Brilliant kid, one of the few Cameroonians to notice when I’m being sarcastic and laugh.

Boris is in the green socks.

Corneille, also from that Terminale class, who is incidentally hooking up with a chick in 3e. Check out those pants!

Some words are really difficult to translate into French (lately I’ve been thinking about "home", "acknowledge"/"acknowledgment", "mind", and even "get"), and at first "grateful"/"gratitude" gave me a hard time too. But if you open your trusty M-W French-English dictionary, issued by Organization Cameroon Headquarters in Yaoundé, to page 534, you’ll see that "grateful" is translated as reconnaissant, literally "recognizing". Oddly, "gratitude" is translated as reconnaissance or also gratitude. Thanks, the French language!

Anyhow the point I’m trying to get at is that I was recently "recognized" in some way for the "work" I’m doing here in Cameroon. Honored Directress intercepted me at a bar in Yaoundé and said she’d received this weird Congressional thing from my Congressman, and that it was a really nice thing saying thank you for serving as a Volunteer. All of us at the table looked at one another like, "Wait, why Ethan??" and I even asked her "Do they know how much I drink?"

So thanks for the recognition, the Honorable Ed Towns — but if it were me, I’d prefer to recognize: my postmate Queen Cristina, Kim from the next village over, Rosalie in the Far North, and maybe one or two others. Side note: there are four different Volunteers all over the world just from our voting district?? New York is amazing.

While I’m uploading stuff, here’s a blurry picture taken by the Boys of one of my students, the one named "Nouyock Luther Theo" — the one who stood up almost two years ago when I said I was from New York, and said "Monsieur, that’s my name!" (Apparently "Nouyock" in local dialect means notre chose, "our thing".) He’s even wearing traditional garb for my borough, the hoodie:

Here’s a slightly better one, where he’s looking a little like a Volunteer himself.

You can see it’s not a big place, just the four computers. Still, they’re pretty well-equipped — scanner, photocopier, printer, and UPSes for each machine. The girl in the shiny jacket is Cecile, she’s the "secretary" and somewhat-manager of the place. Like most people who know "secretariat", she has a relatively large amount of fairly shallow knowledge about computers. Example: she knew a keyboard shortcut to toggle the case of text in Microsoft Word.

One of the machines. They’re new, and they’re the TEG brand, which allegedly comes from Dubai. Word on the street is, not great quality at an extremely reasonable price. Flat-screens!

The auxiliary appliances.

Cecile is showing Josiane something. Josiane’s been coming too, trying to snatch up whatever little knowledge she can get before she goes away for the summer.

After we got back was the Books for Cameroon ceremony, which I mostly avoided, playing gopher and otherwise trying to try to defray the amount of hassle Cristina was no-doubt going through.

Pre-party.

The beneficiaries. My proviseur is bottom-middle, looking directly into the camera.

This is my neighbor, who makes wooden food (and apparently beer).

Some French people who were unable to go to the ceremony because it started two or three hours late.

The Chef was so proud of her efforts that he made her village nobility. Her official title is "Mafo something something" which translates as "queen of development". One of the things I really love about my postmate is that she hasn’t let becoming royalty go to her head!

The Books for Cameroon sorting got pretty massive, pretty fast, and though Spring Break started, I hardly even noticed — I was still in the lab every day that I wasn’t helping to sort. It got kinda tense because time was running out: Cristina and I had COS Conference, and the ceremony of giving of the books was going to be just after we got back.

But then there was COS Conference. COS is an Organization-specific acronym for "close of service", and there was a three-day conference for us to learn how to do it well — both Organization procedures and details, and larger issues like how to get a job and transition back to civilian life.

Traditionally, COS Conference is held in a swank hotel, as part of an implicit message of "Congratulations! You made it!" This year it was at a hotel near downtown Yaoundé — there was air conditioning, hot water, and even a swimming pool! Yaoundé is a lot nicer when you’re submerged in AC all the time.

This conference was markedly different from other Organization "training" events, lighter somehow. Less stuff each day, less intense sessions. I don’t know if they think a Volunteer at this point in their service is burnt out, or just out of patience with Washington’s idea of "training". But, we are Volunteers, and we drank a lot after those sessions.

A few useful or interesting bits of information were shared with us, but the priority for us were:

Language testing, to measure our post-service levels of French.

COS dates, i.e. when am I going home.

Information on whether or not we are going to be replaced.

In true Organization fashion, none of these were fully taken care of until after the conference was over.

Language assessments are done in the Organization with a test called the LPI, the Language Proficiency Interview. Attentive readers may recall that this test gave me a hard time in stage. They are treated, both by Volunteers and Admin as though they are a real thing. In fact, lots of Volunteers are angry or upset about their language levels, feeling they deserved higher grades — a feeling I understand and can identify with. I’ve also had lots of fun discussions along the lines of "I still can’t believe Cherry Drop got such-and-such a level; her French is terrible".

But here’s the thing: the LPI is completely Organization-specific. Go ahead; Google it. It doesn’t even exist outside of our little ivory tower. I tried looking for strategies on passing it back in stage and came up empty. It’s a non-starter. So, yeah, you’d like to hear that your French got better after two years of speaking it imperfectly. But it’s like putting your Klout score on your resume — some group of mendicants assigned you a completely arbitrary level based on vague and indeterminate criteria? Wow, way to be qualified/disqualified for a job! Come on, guys. Anyone who actually cares how well you know French is going to find out the traditional way: by talking to you in French. (Though we can all agree that Cherry Drop will probably figure out a way to turn this to her advantage.)

Language levels came out a few days after the conference, and were followed later by emails of the form "Dearest ETHAN, you was scored ADVANCED MID on the LPI". Official!

COS dates were apparently screwed up due to Washington. People who had applied for early COS dates hadn’t all heard back yet, and they would have had priority on the first batch of regular COS dates if they were rejected, so we all got to sit on our hands for a week or two after the conference ended and wait-and-see. Allegedly Washington had a hard time processing everything because Mali just got evacuated.

At first I got the earliest COS date, which was awesome, but then I managed to change it to a later date (?!) to better coordinate with friends I want to see in Europe. I officially cease being a Volunteer August 3rd, and expect to be home a couple weeks after that.

I told my boss that I think my village is awesome but my school is dysfunctional and that I don’t think we should be high on the list of getting another volunteer. My school really wanted another volunteer, of course, soit informatique or soit English, and there’s certainly a handful of deserving students.. but I’m betting the small group of incoming volunteers will probably be more effective anywhere else.

Other random tidbits: when someone in the States asks you about your experience as a Volunteer, you get 15 seconds max. We saw the American Embassy in Yaoundé and it was sweet. Talking about resumes and interviews got me really excited to go looking for another job!

The view from the hotel room. So exciting to have stories! This is "Rond Point Nlongkak", pronounced like "Long Cock".

Everybody got dressed up for dinner at Honored Directress’s place.

In front of the hotel. Prices for alcohol were ridiculous and they wouldn’t let us bring in drinks so the first night we sat outside here and drank (apparently way too loudly).

Jessica Worful.

The whole family. Honored Directress is the one lying down (lower left).

Trying to look busy.

We also went to a stupid monkey park which was almost two hours away. Here’s Timothy trying to fit in.

This is the blog post I wanted to write two or three weeks ago, when I was still hip-deep in it, but it got pushed to the side.

My postmate Cristina inherited this Books For Cameroon project from our predecessor, a lady named Wendy. Cristina recently succeeded in bringing a French bookstorm to Cameroon. Over 21000 books, which may not seem like a lot but wait until you are faced with over 450 cardboard boxes of books, packed by a French NGO according to subject, to be divided amongst 30 different libraries. Nice books, don’t get me wrong, but.. so many of them.

I was called upon by the forces of good, namely Yaya and Kevin (not depicted). Cristina had been spending a lot of time working on spreadsheets deciding how books needed to be distributed, taking into account size of library, likely user population, levels of students available nearby, etc. We needed to transform boxes of books arranged by title into boxes of books arranged by library. Yaya and Kevin thought it might be possible to use some of those informatique skills I’m rumored to have to transform the various kinds of inputs into a different kind of output: a list, organized by box, of how many of each book needed to go to which libraries. But time flows like a river, and history repeats..

Josiane in the "stacks", looking for a box to unpack.

Quid is apparently a French one-volume encyclopedia, very text-heavy, sorted by subject (not alphabetically). No idea why they sent a box full of "XML In a Nutshell"..

Nothing is ever easy in Cameroon. At best it’s inconvenient. This is one of the things you learn how to do in Cameroon: lower your expectations, and cope. This is a skill that is adaptive for an individual but toxic for a society, because what impetus is there for Cameroon to improve or thrive when nobody complains?

Cristina is a wizard genius scientist for pulling off this project as well as she did. She found a French association, ADIFLOR (something like "Association pour la diffusion international de la francophonie par les livres, oeuvres et revues") who give away books. Nice quality books too, much nicer than what you find in-country. We spent a little while wondering amongst ourselves where the books came from and why we were getting them (as we generally can’t have nice things). Leading theory is that these are misprints and discards convening to outdated school curricula.

Anyhow Cristina did some fundraising to get the money to pay to transport the books to Cameroon, and ADIFLOR has a "special relationship" with Cameroon, so between them and the Lions Club, the books popped right out of customs and drove up here on a truck. After I was drafted by the volunteers doing the sorting just a thirty-minute walk away, I jumped in, banging out code and solving problems with Kevin until late at night. It was perhaps the most fun I’ve had in this country, a harsh reminder that the thing that I love to do most is not that thing for which I volunteered. Different Volunteers cope in different ways, some coming up with worthless make-work projects based around their skillset, some (myself) just drinking way too much and daydreaming about the days when they can finally have job interviews and resumes.

Cristina, packing up sorted books. The technical challenges are, as always, fairly minor when compared to the auxiliary challenges — the packing list being sent to us as a PDF, for example, or how Cristina’s spreadsheet didn’t match up exactly to the packing list. We supported, of course, and when we were good, we were amazing — a book-sorting, box-packing Volunteer machine extracting energy from music and late-night bad decisions.

Cristina said that she didn’t really find a lot of guidance on the Interwebs around this kind of project or how to approach it, so let me give you a few pieces of advice. First, verify that all the boxes are there before you start. Our shipment got tangled up with a shipment for the Lions Club, and we got some of their boxes and I bet they also got some of ours. Some boxes are just completely MIA but it’s hard to know if they’re there or if we maybe just repacked them already. Second, the spreadsheet is a good idea but I’m not completely sure what benefit it provided. If we hadn’t had it, we would have just opened boxes and partagéd books fairly evenly. Is it optimal? No, but it’s a lot easier. Thirdly, get lots of cardboard boxes ready. You can never have too many cardboard boxes.

Josiane (the one who has a crush on me) followed me to the book sorting, and she was actually kind of helpful. Brondone, my neighbor’s kid, was less helpful.

These books are already sorted. (You can tell because of the labels specifying where they’re going.)

St. Patty’s Day is one of those holidays that we celebrate a lot because it reminds us that we’re Americans. We gathered at Yaya’s/Eric’s posts to play frisbee and drink. A lot could be said about this party but won’t be. A picture is worth a thousand words. I had a good time but I ended up with a headache before I even went to bed and started to run a fever when I got home the next day. I don’t think that’s supposed to happen just from drinking too much, but I’m still a novice at this so I’m not sure.

Me and Yaya in our "matching" "vests". We went shopping for this pagne together!

Green beer was formed by the addition of mint syrup, which wasn’t as bad as it deserved to be.

We smelled Danny a lot. (He smells really good.)

Charlie’s Angels.

One of The Boys wanted to know if Lindsey was pregnant. No, and she’s really so damned skinny that it doesn’t even make sense to ask.

Suddenly, Dance Party. Pay attention to Yaya’s expression in these photos. I think she’s queen of the photobombs.

This is a meal that Josiane prepared for me before I left. I guess this means, yes, girlish crush. It’s koki, a Cameroonian dish made from a bean of the same name that you grind up and sort of steam. It was served in a banana leaf (which I removed for this picture) and the complement was macabo, what they call "cocoyams" but are neither coco nor yams.

Club Informatique and I have been starting work on constructing our local-area network (réseau local) with the materials we got from the préstataire a month or two ago. First, I "hired"/invited a technician from Aladji Informatique to come give a talk about how to sertir (we’d say "crimp") an Ethernet cable. That was Wednesday.

It’s nice to not be at the front of the class for once.

This is one of the 4e classrooms that we commandeered for the lesson.

Domche, Cat 5 cable, Wolverine sideburns.

My hair is growing out.

This is Josiane. She’s the daughter of Madame-Ann-the-orange-lady and she’s basically adorbs. She speaks really quietly and quickly and she avoids eye contact and she’s at this stage where every time she touches the computer at all, it’s wide-eyed magical. "Try it," I’ll say, and then she will and she’ll get this look of awestruck wonder. The other day she asked how long I was going to stay here in this country and finding that it was "only" five months, she got really sad, maybe even cried a little bit. I couldn’t tell if it was honest distress at not being able to learn informatique from me — "but there’ll be other volunteers," I said, and she replied, "but they won’t be you" — or something of a girlish crush. "I can’t stay," I told her. "I’m an only child, and every day that I’m here, my parents suffer without me" — my go-to reason for why I’m not staying any longer. In a rash decision I told her that when she gets her Bac she can come visit me in the States, figuring that if it is a girlish crush it’ll give her something to fixate on long enough to get over it. I regretted it pretty much immediately but yesterday she slipped a note into my bag that says "Grand merci as you have made me go to class. What you said to me the other day was true because you told me that you’re the only child to your mother. Me too I’ve thought a lot." So who knows.

We set up a couple cables yesterday — some of them seem to work but they made about a dozen that seem faulty in one way or another and need to be triaged. I demonstrated that the network was working using the nc command to set up a rudimentary telnet server, but with luck tomorrow I can set up some real filesharing software and a web server or something. Also, I’d really love to set up a few networked games — since ZSNES is already on the computers, that would be cool, and something cute like Teeworlds would be wonderful. I’d school them, of course, but I’d be humble about it.

This is the most successful project I’ve had as a volunteer, and it’s really gratifying (as opposed to the other year and a half of pure slog). It’s a little depressing, though, that it took me this long to get to a point where something like this could actually happen. More as it develops..